Kevin P. Fleming recently posted an entry on the Asterisk Wiki about Asterisk SCF that goes as follows:
"... the Asterisk SCF SIP components will provide all the mechanisms required to implement authentication of incoming requests, but they won't provide anything but the most basic mechanisms to decide whether authentication of a particular request should be required. These basic mechanisms will suffice for very simple networks, but they won't support dynamic or complex decision making.
... an Asterisk SCF system administrator or application developer can deploy a small 'hook' component, one which will receive notification that a SIP request has…

"Facebook will be launching a new in-browser video chat application. 'The product has been built on Skype and will include a desktop component. It’s not clear to me whether that means it will just work if a user has Skype already installed on the computer, or if additional software will need to be downloaded even if the user already uses Skype. But it’s clear that there’s very deep integration between the products, and from the user’s perspective, the product will be an in-browser experience.'"

The Asterisk Development Team announces the release of Asterisk 1.8.7.0.
This release is available for immediate download at http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/
The release of Asterisk 1.8.7.0 resolves several issues reported by the community and would have not been possible without your participation.
Thank you!
Please note that a significant numbers of changes and fixes have gone into features.c in this release (call parking, built-in transfers, call pickup, etc.).
NOTE:
Recently, we were notified that the mechanism included in our Asterisk source code releases to download and build support for the iLBC codec had stopped working correctly; a little investigation revealed that…

The Asterisk Development Team announces the release of Asterisk 1.8.6.0.
This
release is available for immediate download athttp://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/
The release of Asterisk 1.8.6.0 resolves several issues reported by the
community and would have not been possible without your participation.
Thank you!
The following is a sample of the issues resolved in this release:
* Fix an issue with Music on Hold classes losing files in playlist when
realtime
is used.
(Closes issue ASTERISK-17875. Reported by David Cunningham. Patched
by Igor
Goncharovsky)
* Resolve a potential crash in…

GNU Gatekeeper version 2.3.5 has been released.
http://www.gnugk.org/gnugk-2-3-5.html
This release has a number of new features as well as a few important bug
fixes.
New features:
- working LDAP support (H.350)
- much better checking of the config file for misspellings or obsolete
settings (Fortytwo=42 is now obsolete)
- SSH support for the status port
- support for sending RIP messages
- QOS data from H.460.9 and RTP sniffing available through status port
and Radius
- enable failover to CatchAll endpoint
- enable failover for calls released by the gatekeeper (eg. timeouts)
- see changes.txt for more new config…

It was reported that: "A security consultant has notified Skype of a cross-site scripting flaw that could be used to change the password on someone's account, according to details posted online. The consultant, Levent Kayan, based in Berlin, posted details of the flaw on his blog on Wednesday and notified Skype a day later. He said on Friday he hasn't heard a response yet. The problem lies in a field where a person can input their mobile phone number. Kayan wrote that a malicious user can insert JavaScript into the mobile phone field of their profile."
Skype has…

The AstLinux Team would like to announce the immediate availability of the 0.7.9 release. This release includes either Asterisk 1.4.42 or
Asterisk 1.8.4.4. All current users are encouraged to upgrade to this release to take advantage of bug fixes and other updates to Asterisk.
A full changelog is available at http://www.astlinux.org
Current users can upgrade from the web interface or from the commandline.
From the CLI:
(Asterisk 1.4)
upgrade-run-image check http://mirror.astlinux.org/firmware